ABSTRACT
Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña [ The Kiss of the Spiderwoman ] (1976) and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo [ Caramel ] (2002) would initially appear to have little in common. Puig’s novel is set against the backdrop of the violently repressive military dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Argentina. Its protagonists, Marxist Valentín Arregui and gay window dresser Luis Alberto Molina, are diametrically opposed characters forced to share a prison cell. Caramelo is a sprawling multigenerational family drama that spans the era from the Mexican Revolution to 2002 and is set in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. The novel’s main protagonists are women, including the narrator Celaya ‘Lala’ Reyes and the Awful Grandmother, a character revered by Lala’s father but feared or hated by the rest of the family. Despite their differences, the novels have a great deal in common, however, including a condemnation of patriarchal repression, a re-inscribing of stories often left out of official histories, and, most notably – the theme that will be addressed in this chapter – a shared love of popular culture.
